Five years after Black Summer: a story of grief, scars and hope for our koalas
Bowdie McBeth’s pilot husband was one of three US airmen killed when fighting a fierce Black Summer blaze near the tiny town of Bredbo. Five years on, this rural community is determined to honour his life and her loss.
The video is just 34 seconds long. It was taken on a handheld camera and it’s shaky, but there’s no mistaking the devastation, physical and emotional, as James Fitzgerald runs towards the remains of his house in rough bush country in southern NSW.
We hear him gasping for breath as he rushes the 100 metres or so from his car.
“What has happened here?” he almost whispers to himself as he captures the smouldering ruin ahead. Then his voice grows louder: “I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!” Now he’s in tears. The previous night he’d left an injured koala in the high care room in his house and another koala and two goannas in enclosures. They are surely dead. “I’m sorry,” weeps the man who has spent his life protecting wildlife. “I’m so sorry, it’s all gone.”
It’s about 4pm on January 23, 2020, another day of the devastating Black Summer bushfires that burnt millions of hectares across NSW, Victoria, SA and the ACT, killed at least 33 people and destroyed more than 3000 buildings – including the three homes and several sheds on Fitzgerald’s property at Peak View, near Cooma in the Snowy Monaro region.
Fitzgerald had been out all that day, looking for animals burnt in the fires that had raged for weeks. Like other Rural Fire Service volunteers he thought the area around his 700ha wildlife sanctuary, Two Thumbs, was safe. “Even my fire captain was out shearing sheep that day,” he says. “If we had been told there was a risk, we would have been on high alert.”
Fitzgerald had left his house at about 7am, met up with others and gone into burnt-out forest about 20km away. About 11am the wind picked up and the search was abandoned because of the danger of falling branches. He headed to the vet at Cooma with the one koala he had found, and became increasingly concerned. He was right to be worried: Two Thumbs was in danger.
The captain of the local RFS brigade, Merino stud owner James Barron, broke away from his work and with another volunteer jumped in a fire truck at about noon. They soon realised it was impossible to defend Two Thumbs. Just before 1pm, a waterbombing aircraft manned by three US airmen was redirected from Adaminaby to drop retardant. Three times the Lockheed C-130 Hercules swept across Fitzgerald’s land before it was hit by a violent tail wind. It stalled and plummeted to the ground. All three men – Captain Ian McBeth, First Officer Paul Hudson and Flight Engineer Rick DeMorgan – were killed. It was one of the most horrifying incidents of that terrible summer.
Fitzgerald heard on the radio that contact had been lost with the Hercules, but thought it was closer to the Snowy Mountains. He headed home, growing more concerned as he drove through burnt-out areas and past a police roadblock. “I drove up near the house but stopped a little bit away because things were still on fire, then I just ran in,” he says. “It was hard to believe what I was seeing. All I could see was the chimney that was in the lounge room and everything else was burnt. I was just hoping, which was ridiculous, that somehow my koalas were alive.”
Fitzgerald had been rescuing burnt wildlife from the fire grounds since November. Earlier that month, on January 4, parts of the Monaro had felt like a nuclear war zone.
“On every mountain, in every direction, we were just totally surrounded by fire,” he recalls. “Everything was grey and black, and we were just running around in the fire trucks trying to put out all the spot fires that were coming in advance of the main front. I remember one day trying to protect someone’s house, and there was this giant black, billowing thing going way up into the sky like a big monster. And I’m thinking, ‘What on Earth can we do with a couple of fire trucks and a couple of fire hoses?’
“In the Black Summer you got a serving of tragedy, and you thought that was really bad, and then ‘Oh, you thought that was bad, try this’ – and you got another serving of it. When the plane crash happened, that was just the worst serving you could possibly get, to have three people die. We’re a small rural community and it was an absolutely massive tragedy.”
The 2019-2020 bushfires raged for five months, peaking in December and January. More than 207,000ha burned within the Snowy Monaro region alone, including 33.5 per cent of Kosciuszko National Park.
Five years on Two Thumbs is green again, with little evidence of that terrible day in January 2020. The trees and grasses have regenerated quickly. The koalas that had been all but wiped out are back. So are the kangaroos and wallabies and possums and greater gliders – a population helped by researchers and staff from the International Fund for Animal Welfare, applying science and innovation to restore the habitat.
Scattered around Two Thumbs (named for the twin thumbs on each of the koala’s paws) are marsupial dens of various sizes, nest boxes made of fire-resistant polymer and man-made hollows to replace the thousands of hollow-bearing trees lost in the blaze. There are special water dispensers on the gum trees, with nipples for koalas to lap the water. And there are several new multi-use enclosures to house recovering animals and birds.
James Fitzgerald, too, is recovering. He has trouble falling asleep at night, but five years on he drives around his property with more optimism. “It looks very different now,” he says. “After the fire there was just black ground and the trees were black, there were no leaves on them. It was like a ghost forest because all the music and movement of the bush was missing. Normally you see animals, like a wombat running by or a bird flying or singing. But after the fires it was just eerily silent.”
Not everyone in this historic sheep and cattle farming area has agreed with Fitzgerald’s efforts over the years to create a sanctuary for koalas, kangaroos and other animals. But he has been publicly advocating for koalas for decades, and had been dogged in his efforts to create a release site for injured animals. Before the fire, Two Thumbs had a breeding koala population and rehabilitation enclosures.
Two Thumbs comprises three adjacent properties. Fitzgerald bought the first in 2004, and built a 2ha enclosure for injured macropods there. The second property, bought in 2013, includes a beautiful stretch of the Bredbo River which “is a great spot for platypuses”, he says. It had two houses, a bunk house, workshop, shearing shed and machinery shed and it was where Fitzgerald lived at the time of the fire. The third property had been used as a weekender until he bought it in 2016. None of this land had run sheep for decades. In 2013, Fitzgerald put the land into a trust. All of the infrastructure across the three properties was destroyed on January 23, 2020.
For years Fitzgerald had walked his land, sleeping out in his swag, sitting in the forest, listening, watching, learning. It’s a remote spot, 45 minutes from the small town of Bredbo, but there were regular visits from researchers, including scientists from the ANU’s Research School of Biology who were investigating the strange behaviour of koalas that chewed the bark of Eucalyptus mannifera, commonly known as Brittle Gum, to supplement their usual diet of leaves. Infrastructure was basic but vets and other wildlife carers brought injured animals there. Fitzgerald wondered about setting up an eco-tourism business to educate people about the bush. “It’s a very beautiful place,” he says. “If you had to design the swimming hole at the river, you couldn’t do it better. It’s really deep, it’s got a beautiful cliff on one side, it’s got two waterfalls, there’s a natural spa.”
The 59-year-old has always loved animals. Growing up in Canberra, he roamed the slopes of Mount Ainslie and Mount Majura, observing the grasshoppers, frogs and lizards and rescuing injured birds. Later he joined the Australian Taxation Office and worked his way up to a senior management level running its accounting systems, but he dreamt of creating a wildlife sanctuary. After years of commuting from Canberra he retired in 2015 to live full-time on the property.
“Some people are born to play music,” he says. “I’m not good at playing music, I’m not good at art, but wildlife is the thing that I’ve been interested in. It’s just part of who you are.”
That part of him was ripped away by the Black Summer fires. Fitzgerald was left with only his truck, a spare shirt and an old fire blanket. The only thing that made much sense at the time was to rescue the koalas left homeless by the blaze. For weeks he slept rough in the bush, ferrying burnt and emaciated animals to the ANU for rehab with the help of Dr Karen Marsh, who had researched at Two Thumbs. A team from the University of the Sunshine Coast used a thermal camera mounted on a drone to locate koalas, and the International Fund for Animal Welfare funded the university’s koala detection dog, Bear, to help on the ground.
Like so many others desperately trying to cope at that harrowing time, Fitzgerald was living off adrenaline. He spent nights on the concrete floor in the ANU animal house, ready to feed the koalas when they woke. Sourcing the leaves for up to 20 koalas was a huge task. Marsh spent hours each day collecting gum leaves in the bush and at her property 50km from Canberra where some of the koalas were later housed. Gardeners at the university and the nearby National Botanic Gardens weighed in, collecting leaves too. Help came from volunteers at Bredbo Landcare.
That summer, Australians were horrified as media stories revealed the plight of injured koalas up and down the east coast. As money poured in from local and international donors horrified by the scale of the disaster – most notably $51 million in response to a social media bushfire appeal by comedian Celeste Barber, who posted about the fires at Eden – the koala became a symbol of the devastation as individuals and groups scrambled to save the species. A Two Thumbs GoFundMe page which had been set up to fundraise for research before the January 23 fire would go on to raise $146,000 for koala research projects. Fitzgerald gave $100,000 to the ANU to help Marsh’s research, and used some to build a koala enclosure on her property.
As the crisis eased in March 2020, Fitzgerald returned to live in a caravan at Two Thumbs while he organised five new enclosures, subdivided into 25 separate areas, to house koalas and other animals. He put his $230,000 house insurance money into the trust to fund this and other infrastructure rather than rebuild his home. Donations came from the International Fund for Animal Welfare and the Humane Society International, among others. Fitzgerald and his friends rescued 41 of the 204 koalas saved in NSW in the Black Summer fires.
For seven months in 2020, Two Thumbs was without power. “I went through winter in 2020 in a caravan with no heating,” he says. “And sometimes it’d be literally minus four inside that caravan. I had to brace myself to get under the doona because it was frozen.” He hauled in several converted shipping containers; they are still the only accommodation at Two Thumbs.
Emotions ran high in the communities of Peak View and Bredbo at this time, with the loss of homes and animals amplified by the grief felt over the deaths of the three US airmen. Across the region more broadly, there was infighting among wildlife groups and carers about funding and the care of animals. Fitzgerald rejects criticism that the money raised after the fire helped him turn a small sanctuary into a bigger operation that hasn’t proved warranted, saying: “Our area rescued between two and five koalas a year. We rescued a lot during the fire so we did have to scale up and I made sure I built enclosures that could take other animals and birds.”
But it was tough: “Every day I had to say to myself, ‘Keep going.’ I was suicidal for the first two years … so it was a survival mechanism. Just keep yourself busy.”
He was back living in his happy place, but it was different: “Before, I used to just sit out there and listen, but since the fires I’ve stayed out of the bush. The only time I’ve gone in there is when we’ve been doing science. After the fire, it was just too sad.”
He wondered sometimes if he could go on. “I didn’t want to see black again,” he says. Two years ago, he bought 40ha of land in the Daintree; he spends holidays there, and intends to put it into the trust as a wildlife sanctuary.
The deaths of the three US airmen asthey triedto save his property weighs on Fitzgerald. “The hardest part is thinking about those three families who every morning wake up without their dad, without their life partner,” he says. “For a lot of us, it’s sort of five years ago – but it’s every morning for them.”
After the crash Lieutenant-Colonel Drew Cunnar, air attache at the US Embassy in Canberra, travelled to the region to give Fitzgerald one of the propellers from the C-130 Hercules.
In one of those quirks of fate Cunnar had been to flight school in the US with Ian McBeth, the pilot, and knew him well. Fitzgerald figured no one would ever see the propeller at Two Thumbs, so he organised with Mat Thomas, owner of the historic Bredbo Inn Hotel, to set up a memorial there. The propeller piece now sits at a special spot in the hotel, with portraits of the three airmen hanging above it.
Every year on January 23, there is a memorial event in the town. From her home in Montana, Bowdie McBeth talks of her grief at the sudden loss of her 44-year old husband Ian. He’d worked in firefighting aviation for seven years, and had fought Australian bushfires many times before the crash. She and her three children are still “pretty devastated”, she tells The Weekend Australian Magazine. “It’s one of those things that you never really think is going to happen to you. And then having it happen so far away … if they had crashed in the US, it would have been a little bit easier.”
The families of the three airmen travelled to Sydney in February 2020 for the state memorial service for all those who died in the Black Summer fires. They went to the crash site in the paddock next door to Two Thumbs, and they visited the ANU, where they got to hold three rescued koalas named Ian, Rick and Paul in honour of the airmen.
Cunnar, now retired from the air force and living in Texas, where he works for an Australian-based aviation company, remains a key link between the families and the communities of Bredbo and Cooma – where the Lions Club has created a memorial around another of the Hercules’ propellers.
He speaks highly of Fitzgerald and Mat Thomas and James Barron and his wife Jules for their efforts to memorialise the airmen. There are also memorials at the Peak View fire station and the crash site.Says Cunnar: “These are people who want to make sure these guys are never forgotten because they put their lives on the line for this small community in rural Australia.”
The restoration of Two Thumbs is a fitting memorial to all those who lost their lives during the Black Summer. So, too, is the action taken by the Federal Government to declare koalas in NSW, Queensland and the ACT an endangered species. Researchers remain concerned about the numbers in these states. Dr Deidre de Villiers, scientific manager at Endeavour Veterinary Ecology in Queensland, says: “In Victoria and South Australia they’re not listed as a threatened species because they are overabundant. Because they’re quite healthy, they don’t suffer from the chlamydial diseases and the diseases we get up in Queensland, for instance. They’re very healthy, and healthy koalas breed.” Even so, she points out that fires can rapidly reduce even high numbers.
Scientists estimate that before white settlement there may have been 10 million koalas in Australia, but now we’re down to between 300,000 and 600,000. Counting them has been difficult, but new drone technology is making tracking easier and more accurate.
The fire at Two Thumbs was catastrophic for koalas, but ironically spawned more research. After the ANU’s Karen Marsh became a crucial part of the rescue effort in early 2020, others were pulled in to help. Doctoral student Murraya Lane arrived at the ANU lab that summer; she’d previously worked on scorpions but says: “I walked in, and day one Karen had about 20 koalas …” Lane jumped into helper mode and as the panic subsided, switched research topics. For 18 months she walked across Two Thumbs, monitoring koalas and sampling leaves and “epicormic” growth – the new shoots activated after bushfires. “We found that koalas stayed in burnt areas and were feeding in those areas,” she says. She found that the koalas that stayed within the fire-scarred area were able to recover their condition over the next two years. Lane was awarded her PhD last month.
She and Marsh remain interested in the patterns of koala behaviour observed at Two Thumbs. “There are so many things we don’t know about why koalas occur in different landscapes, why we end up with a lot of koalas in one place and not many in another,” Marsh says. “We know with domestic animals, livestock, how important the ‘carrying capacity’ of the landscape is – how much food and what quality of food you need to have the healthiest stock. I think it’s the same for wild animals, it’s just so much harder to measure and understand.”
Two Thumbs has recovered as a wildlife corridor and scientific research continues there, but since the fire there has been less recovery and rehabilitation work. The five big enclosures, now sometimes empty, were built at a time when it was thought there would be an ongoing need to care for koalas unable to find food in the scorched forest. In the end, this didn’t happen, says Steve Garlick, who runs Possumwood, a wildlife veterinary centre and rehabilitation facility in Bungendore. “Only about 200 koalas needed care in NSW after the fires,” he says. “James may have overestimated the number of enclosures he needed, but I don’t think that was any sort of deliberate action.” Possumwood sends about 100 animals a year to be released at Two Thumbs; Garlick says it’s one of the few areas in the state where recovering animals can be safely returned to the wild.
Rebecca Keeble, the International Fund for Animal Welfare’s Oceania Regional Director, sees Two Thumbs as an important wildlife corridor. Fitzgerald has a long association with people at IFAW, and it began helping him at Two Thumbs after the fire. It has been involved in the planting of native grasses and trees, and building nest boxes and dens. “Two Thumbs is such an incredible story in terms of recovery and survival,” Keeble says. “We look at it now as a really important stepping stone in the landscape. We’re trying to reconnect wildlife corridors across the country and allow the free movement of our native wildlife – particularly at times where they’re having to adapt to the impacts of climate change and development – and Two Thumbs is a great example of what can happen if we help the landscape recover.”
The restoration of the land has paid off. Just before Christmas, the Sunshine Coast researchers’ thermal imaging drone located 18 koalas in about 100ha, and for the first time in five years Fitzgerald was excited: “It makes me want to go bushwalking again,” he says.
And if you sometimes wonder exactly what these animals that sleep 20 hours a day actually contribute to the Australian bush, James Fitzgerald has an answer. “I think the koala is saying to us, ‘If you want to save me, you have to save hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest,” he says. “The koala is not like a magpie or a brush-tailed possum that can thrive within the human environment. Koalas have only just managed to survive where we’ve fragmented their habitat. Even when we had intact forests they struggled to get enough nutrition, and they adapted to a low-energy diet by sleeping 20 hours a day. They can’t sleep any longer, they need to eat, but when we fragment the forests they suffer more nutritional loss and that’s when they get chlamydia and other diseases.
“I think the koala is saying to us, ‘You really need to protect a lot of forest, and by doing that there’s a whole heap of other species you will also protect.’
“The koala is doing us a favour.”
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